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The Rational Response Squad is a group of atheist activists who impact society by changing the way we view god belief. This site is a haven for those who are pushing back against the norm, and a place for believers of gods to have their beliefs exposed as false should they want to try their hand at confronting us.

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Military Uses Bullshit for Sucide Prevention

They're using Rick Warren's "Purpose Driven Life" bullshit in a MANDATORY presentation to prevent suicide. Not only is this a major 1st ammendment violation, it's a waste of taxpayer money and does harm by using this shit instead of methods that actually work.

I would have put this in News, but hardly anyone reads that thread and this is irrational enough to belong here. Hopefully once asshat Bush is out the fundie takeover of the military can be reversed.

Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team

He is even more idiotic than that Matt. Not only does Darwin have nothing to do with the Soviet Union (Um, he died in 1882 a full forty years before there was a Soviet Union to lead) but he makes Abraham Lincoln as the counter example. Lincoln was an avowed athiest.

Actually the early Soviet Union didn't even believe in Darwinian Evolution - the believed in Lysenkoism, with disastrous results. The very idea that any military leader even thought for a minute doing this was ok is fucked up. The entire presentation is fucked up on so many levels.

BTW Karl Marx also died before the founding of the Soviet Union. Is Rick Warren really that stupid? WTF did Obama and McCain bother going to that debate in front of someone that's either that stupid or dishonest (or both? )

Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team

OK Matt, I will grant you that Karl Marx died when he did. Even so, the connection between his work and communism is much less tenuous. The only thing that I can see in favor of Darwin having any connection is that it is a given that all communists are godless. I see two problem with that one.

The first and most major one is that Charles Darwin was a biblical literalist (at least according to wikipedia, which may be wrong on anything).

The second comes right from google news. The other day, the Patriach of Russia died and they are looking for a replacement. Prior to the fall of communism, he was a high ranking KGB officer who spent most of his career persecuting Orthodox Christians. Gee, he went from godless communist to head of the church over night. I suppose all things are possible through the grace of the FSM but I suspect that he was secretly religious while serving as chief persecuter.

Now, as far as your question of just how stupid Rick Warren is, remember that I also observed that he used a known Atheist as an example of a godly person. Conclusion? Yes, he really is that stupid.

From what I've read Darwin at least later in life no longer believed in the Bible. No matter what actually naming him as a Soviet Leader may even be more stupid than that idiotic "Expelled" moive's claim that "Darwinism" lead to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Would have even been funnier if he had named Jefferson as US leader. The whole presentation was an epic fail from the point of anyone who has half a clue.

Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team

Yah, the whole presentation has epic fail written all over it. You get no disagreement from me on that one.

However, the link to evolution and the holocaust is not really that hard to establish.

Don't get me wrong here, the whole idea that you are either an Xtian or a Nazi is fucktard bullshit.

Yet what point is there to the “final solution” if there are not clear blood lines that need to be improved? If we all were descended from Adam and Eve a few thousand years ago, then no blood lines can possibly exist.

The fact of the matter is that the holocaust is predicated on evolution as being a real thing. Remove evolution form the picture and you have no reason for genocide.

Why is it these moron's don't see that they are laying the same bricks on the road to theocracy that the Muslims in the East have already succeeded at?

So the way to deal with phycological trama is to throw a bible at them? When they know they cant do it directly (WINK WINK) they throw the book at them back door through a Jesus fan. It's ok to violate the Constitution as long as you sneak through the loophole of the backdoor.

I wonder if they would feel the same if the book were written by a Jew or Muslim?

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."ObamaCheck out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under BrianJames Rational Poet also on twitter under Brianrrs37

Yet what point is there to the “final solution” if there are not clear blood lines that need to be improved? If we all were descended from Adam and Eve a few thousand years ago, then no blood lines can possibly exist.

The fact of the matter is that the holocaust is predicated on evolution as being a real thing. Remove evolution form the picture and you have no reason for genocide.

Untrue. I wrote a thread on this a while back. I'll see if I can find it.

To blame the Holocaust on atheism or especially "Darwinism" (a meaningless term) is preposterous. Anyone with even the most basic understanding of the Third Reich will understand that it is something quite the opposite that makes the Nazi regime so terrifying. The Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer pointed out that:

The basic motivation [of the Holocaust] was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology – which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means

What may make the Third Reich remarkable is the astonishing degree to which the entire enterprise was built from a foundation of myth and delusion so astonishingly inane that, before 1933, most of Hitler's opponents dismissed him as a ranting idiot and a fringe lunatic. And who could blame them? But then, moving forward a few years, the Nazis had already codified their delusions in the form of law. In 1935, the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Law and the Reich Citizenship Law to deny Jews in Germany citizenship. At the same time, the Nazis passed the "Law for Protection of German Blood and Honor", which used a ridiculous pseudoscientific basis for distinguishing between a Juden, a Mischling and a Deutscher.

What makes the Holocaust even more remarkable, apart from its total iniquity, is that it represents the most total pursuit of a path based on a total delusion. Stalin and Mao murdered many more people, but the Cultural Revolution and the gulag archipelago derived from the obsession with power that both dictators had. The Holocaust had no such pragmatic gains in it. It was costing money, depleting Germany of educated people, a drain on wartime resources. There was absolutely no reason for its pursuit other than the complete and utter delusion of the "world Jewish conspiracy" which the Nazi leadership obsessed itself with.

If the horrors of Nazi Germany should teach us anything, it should teach us of the terrible dangers of a preposterous ideology that sacrifices the rationality of the individual for the emotions of the crowd (which was precisely how Hitler came to power), and which is seeped in a fantasy world of preposterous myth. The Nazis came to power on the Dolchstoßlegende, the famous "Stab-in-the-back" myth which was propagated extensively by the Nazis (and in many cases, believed by them as well), which the German people were only too happy to accept. The premise of the myth was that the German post-WWI woes were due to a stab in the back by the German leadership which surrendered to the Entente powers (hence resulting in the hated Treaty of Versailles) while German forces were "50 miles from Paris"*. Eventually, the various arms of Nazi mythology became intertwined, and Hitler became obsessed with the notion that the stab actually resulted from a Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy to control the world. What makes the Nazis so frightening is not that they were "atheists" or "Darwinists" but the fact that their entire enterprise, their beauracracy, their worldview, was based on myth and delusion of the most appalling sort, which sort of grew and grew into a massive web of mutually reinforcing delusions, which were so intertwined in the Germans during the Nazi rule that they became axioms, seeped into the consciousness of the nation.

*This itself was just another part of the ever-growing body of Nazi delusion. The German forces in late 1918 were near collapse as the Allies advanced on Flanders and rolled back the German offensive at Ypres.

"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.

DG, that is all very true. However, you missed my point. The connection that I am making is one of correlation not causation. If anyone tries to make a causation argument, then I would start looking for the logical fallacies in whatever the argument is.

Even so, fundies make the connection every so often. Now I have not gone much into that nor have I watched Expelled but I can imagine that it plays out somewhere along the lines of:

Darwinism is against the church and therefore evil.

All evil things are one and the same.

The holocaust was evil.

Therefore Darwinism is the same as the holocaust.

As far as Rick Warren goes, I don't see anything about creationism on any of his web sites. Even so, he is a Southern Baptist, so it is not much of a stretch to suspect that he may also be a literalist.

Now, as I said, to the literalist mindset, we are all one people with a common ancestor about 6,000 years ago. So there really can't be room for different blood lines in the world, as we really are all one large family. In short, that mindset is too narrow to admit the type of distinctions made by the Nazi regime.

To make those distinctions, you have to have a broader world view that contains blood lines and that requires a minimal if bizarre awareness of biology as a science. One could just as easily make the connection from the work of Gregor Mendel who was doing his experiments in what later became genetics while Darwin was collecting finches in the Galapagos islands.

So Mendel and Darwin were contemporaries and their respective works are both sources for what came later. A loose approximation might be that Darwin provided the big picture and Mendel provided the details. Had Darwin not published his work on evolution, the science of biology would have been set back a couple of decades but the work of Mendel would have led to our modern understanding of evolution in due time anyway.

So no, neither Mendel nor Darwin can be properly said to have a causative role in the final solution. Even so, I have no problem with either of them having a correlative connection.

If the general public only knew the bullshit that the military wasted money on!!! I am a 6 year navy vet. and If there is one thing the military is good at, its wasting money. Just recently the navy adopted a new PT(Physical Training) uniform. They spent millions on them. and for what. before we would just wear whatever we had and we got along fine. now they get this gay ass uniform like it is supposed to improve our fitness. but that is only scratching the surface. I used to fly missions over iraq and most of the time we were just flying them to get "flights". there was no real objective, just go out and fly so we can say we got this many flights this month. And jet fuel is not cheap these days.

"Take all the heads of the people
and hang them up before the Lord
against the sun.” -- Numbers 25:4